By Dr. David W. Overbey
23 March 2016
One of the major topics in a recent Democrat primary debate that most Americans—regardless of party affiliation—have forgotten about or lost interest in, was the Flint, Michigan water crisis. In order to make up for a tax break given to wealthy corporations, Republican governor Rick Snyder of Michigan decided it would be a good idea to change the water source for the city of Flint, without changing the way that water was treated, to save money. As a result, Flint’s water is now contaminated with lead, which is poisonous and effects children for a lifetime. Intellectuals and critical thinkers in this society, a minority for sure, are likely the only people who will continue to harp on this crisis and ask questions like why the Obama administration and Federal government has not treated the Flint water crisis as a national emergency that demands urgent attention. Many people who reside in Flint, including children, have been poisoned by the lead-contaminated water, and this poisoning has caused irreversible lifelong damage to people’s brains and physiological well-being. There is no antidote for lead poisoning.
Is it unrealistic to expect that people have clean, running water to drink and to bathe in, as a basic service government should provide? Already this disgraceful event appears to have departed from the American consciousness as the political season lumbers on with unending examination of Donald Trump and the media-driven obsession with getting Bernie Sanders out of the way as soon as possible.
Rather than get into a rhetorical quagmire about why the National Guard could, for example, be rebuilding Flint’s water system infrastructure right now or why everything is the fault of Congress, I wish to point out that the Flint water crisis reveals a bogus and disingenuous representation of the intellectual in American society, and a clash between intellectualism and faith that undermines our country’s well-being. To begin, it is not an “idea” that the water in Flint has been poisonous for some time and apparently will be poisonous for the foreseeable future; it is a fact. But it is an idea—and an intellectual one at that—that the Flint water crisis betrays how little Americans really care about one another and how extreme their views are when it comes to the rigid insistence that government has no obligation whatsoever to provide its people with basic needs and services.
The crisis in Flint (and it is a crisis, not an inconvenience, when people are living in a poisoned infrastructure) has drawn attention to the fact that such a crisis is not limited to Flint. Other cities have antiquated, polluted water systems. The USA Today reported “High Lead Levels Found In 2,000 Water Systems Across USA (2016, March 17). That’s 2,000 water systems “spanning all 50 states.” Some examples of contaminated water systems include “a water sample at a Maine elementary school [that] was 42 times higher than the EPA limit of 15 parts per billion, while a Pennsylvania preschool was 14 times higher” according to records. The report goes on: “At an elementary school in Ithaca, N. Y. one sample tested this year at a stunning 5,000 ppb of lead, the EPA’s threshold for ‘hazardous waste’.” Poisonous infrastructures are not limited to lead-contaminated water. Recently, media covered a story of a Town Hall building in Illinois that has mold growing in the ceiling. Not enough money, of course, either to fix the problem or build a new building. Breathing mold is bad for one’s health, in case that needs to be pointed out.
The intellectual’s reaction to this problem will include the possible reality that America’s government doesn’t care about its people, an idea people don’t want to fathom or will dismiss as a “conspiracy,” the facts about poisoned water and mold-covered ceilings irrelevant in the face of the people’s faith in the good will of their elected officials and the institutions that exist to serve them. Meanwhile,when a city of people have been poisoned by lead-contaminated water, the national government’s reaction is as though it is no big deal.
It’s not just a matter of people being indifferent to something that isn’t happening to them personally—this problem shows a level of alienation and disregard for one’s fellow citizens that is disturbing, both in terms of the short-lived attention to the problem itself by the public as well as the public’s lack of expectation that government at some level—the federal level if need be—should treat this crisis as a national emergency. Instead, public discourse delves into yet another civics lesson on why the money and manpower just can’t be there to take care of the situation. While there may be a great deal of chatter on social media about how awful this problem is, the fact remains that the government’s response is incredibly slow in light of the severity of the danger the problem poses, and the public seems unwilling to consider the lead-poisoned water problem in all fifty states as a glaring sign their government couldn’t care less about its well-being, even when we are talking about the water young school children drink in an Ivy School city (Ithaca is home to Cornell University).
While the indifference to what has been happening in Flint does not have a single cause or explanation, I would argue that a major factor in the public’s indifference and the government’s inaction is a tragic result of a faith-based view of the world, and America in particular. There is a secular faith that holds everything will be OK because in America things always have a happy ending; and that if some people suffer it must be their fault. Such a position is a tenant of both religious and secularist faith: those of religious faith see the poisoned water as a form of God’s punishment of immoral people, a version of the same idea that became popular during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Secular faith argues that the affected people are themselves either lazy and poor and thus deserve no better or that the local officials are lazy and incompetent and so the suffering of the locals is justified--a twisted version of “survival of the fittest” if you will. People in Flint, according to such mindsets, are not educated or hard-working enough to live somewhere else, so it is not an outrage they have literally been poisoned by the Michigan state government.
Both forms of faith--religious and secular-- run so strong and deep that a scientific framework for how and why this poisoning occurred is not even worthy of consideration and a distraction from the blessed life all of us have because we live in America, as though Flint and Beverly Hills may as well be the same place. It doesn’t take an intellectual to realize that the wealth and quality of life in such places is drastically different, and one cannot speak of “America” as though it were a place of homogenous well being and equality.
My point, then, is that it is not intellectualism that is dangerous, but faith--be it religious or secular. Secular faith in the American way leads to apathy and indifference even in the face of events like this one that ought to disgust the entire nation and heighten awareness about the quality of local infrastructures everywhere. Secular faith feeds the valid but beaten-to-death observation that Congress has been obstructionist toward the President’s attempts to enact worthwhile programs and adequately fund the EPA. Thus, the public simply accepts that Flint will continue to have lead-contaminated water until “the system” is able to get around to fixing the problem.
As for religious faith, I have no objection to religious organizations, although it is obvious to me that at least some of them are havens of bigotry and hate-mongering. In any case, all the faith in the world in any deity one may worship will have no affect on the situation in Flint. All the prayers and good wishes will not reverse the neurological, developmental, and physiological damage done to residents, especially the children. It is all well and good to want to be a good person and avow to be thy “brother’s keeper,” as it were. But such religious disposition is worthless when it comes to a problem that can only be understood scientifically and can only be dealt with when one lets go of these secular and religious forms of faith. And that means listening to the intellectual rather than vilifying such a person.
People in whom we put a great deal of trust can turn out to be terrible human beings who are not only incompetent but appear, like Gov. Snyder, to think that the extreme suffering of others simply falls under the “shit happens” category of how life works. Obviously Gov. Snyder doesn’t give a damn about the people of Flint, and the EPA apparently doesn’t either, as it has no commitment to the scientific focus and professionalism necessary to make sure that people don’t turn on faucets in their own homes that release poison. That is too much to ask of them. The public can resort to its predictable blaming of the GOP for undermining the EPA’s mission, but that response achieves nothing but to reinforce a "good vs. bad" view of the world. The EPA has no excuse for letting a problem like this occur.
I find it easy to believe Gov. Snyder hates the people whom he serves--except the wealthy ones--and enjoys their suffering and misery as a marker of his superiority, and I think it is obvious such a hateful disposition is common today among Americans in powerful positions as well as the public at large who I think couldn’t care less about what has happened in Flint. There are exceptions, but there’s a reason Flannery O’Connor titled her famous short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
One could say this perspective on the Flint water crisis is a cheap-shot at faith-based worldviews and that my disgust toward our country’s attitudes isn’t doing anything to solve the problem. But I would counter that a longtime decline in scientific knowledge and approaches to problem-solving, in addition to contempt for the intellectual’s value to society are a big part of why this crisis happened and how predictably slow whatever response has been. Equally predictable has been the public relations media effort by Michigan authorities to assure the detached, already-tired-of-hearing about it public that everything is fine and dandy, as uniformed soldiers smile while handing Flint residents cases of bottled water. Don’t use your imagination for a second to think how miserable and denigrating it must be to live with bottled water indefinitely. Smile and have a positive attitude: that is the American way.
The intellectual isn’t dangerous for pointing out that popular, long-held ideas may be faulty, even completely ignorant. At worst, such realizations cause others a sense of discomfort and dent one’s ego. Big deal. No one is always right about everything; the intellectual is devoted to the realm of ideas, not trouble-making. But faith-based views, on the other hand, tend to incubate fundamentalist mentalities over time, and such a mindset works against the openness, curiosity, and empirical observance that a society must have to be scientifically functional. Lest one think intellectualism is merely logical and calculating while faith is “from the heart,” it is the scientific and intellectually-minded person that recognizes what a terrible thing it is that is happening in Flint, and how easily avoidable it was had adherence to basic scientific principles and functional governance been operational. In the meantime, the faith-based mindset insulates itself against the anger and outrage everyone ought to feel, and equates basic science with comic-book science fiction.
The harsh truth is that the faith-based mindset is first and foremost interested in coasting through a permanent la-la land, where any prolonged attention to something like the crisis in Flint must be a symptom of someone who lacks faith, who refuses to accept that everything will always be OK, that the American system, while not perfect, works, and it will get the job done, just be patient, etc. That mindset is dangerous, because from this perspective even something as truly horrific as what has happened in Flint, not to mention the mean-spirited disdain for regular citizens who need clean water to live like the rest of us, will never make any difference to how such a person sees the world or how society really works. And as long as faith-based views persist while intellectual views are ridiculed and dismissed, more crises will follow, and all the faith in the world won’t stop them.
David W. Overbey has a PhD in rhetoric and media studies. He is co-host of the Modus Operandi Podcast and the MoSports Podcast. He has fifteen years of teaching experience at universities in different regions of the country. You can contact him at badteacher515@gmail.com
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